BBC smashes Winter Olympics streaming records

The BBC has more than tripled its record viewership of Olympic Winter Games streams after Pyeongchang 2018 received 22.2 million requests.

It represents a 258 per cent increase on the 6.2 million BBC streams for the Sochi 2014 Games.

BBC TV coverage attracted an overall audience of 33.2 million, with 17.7 million unique browsers following the BBC’s digital coverage across PC (30 per cent), tablet (18 per cent), mobile (47 per cent) and connected TVs (five per cent) in the UK alone.

According to the corporation, over three million users signed in on mobile and tablet, where they could set up medal notifications and get the latest Games news in the ‘My Sport’ section.

Across social media, BBC Sport’s collaborations with Snapchat and Instagram saw millions of users access daily stories and native video, accounting for more than 50 million video views in the UK.

Neil Hall, head of product, BBC Sport, said: “We want to make sure audiences can watch all the action from major events however they want. We gave people unprecedented choice this year across BBC Sport and BBC iPlayer - whether it’s watching our world-class live coverage, highlights packages, clips or following the latest news and analysis. Audiences have really embraced that with this year’s coverage being streamed over three times more than the previous Winter Olympics.”